Section 230

A federal law protects website publishers who add material to defamatory posts and attempt to elicit greater discussion on the topic, New York’s highest court ruled earlier this week.

In a 4-3 decision on Tuesday, the New York Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a defamation suit brought by the owner of a New York City apartment rental and sales company against competitors who also operate a blog that chronicles the city’s real estate industry.

Online photographs of a bikini-clad woman accompanied by unflattering comments did not invade her privacy, a federal judge in Arizona recently ruled.

A federal bankruptcy court in Texas became one of the first to find that individuals can be held liable for linking to defamatory blog posts earlier this year.

The court in In re Perry held that an individual's e-mail opened him up to a defamation claim even though he did not author any of the inflammatory postings himself.

A group of Google lawyers and executives are facing criminal prosecution in Italy for not immediately removing from their Italian Web site a video depicting a group of teenagers teasing a boy with Downs syndrome.

A University of Delaware student is withdrawing a lawsuit filed this month over allegedly libelous statements made on the Web site JuicyCampus.com, nipping in the bud what could have been a test of the site's sweeping support of anonymous speech on the Internet.

The Fifth Circuit ruled on May 16 that neither MySpace nor its parent company, News Corporation, could be responsible for the sexual assault of an underage user who misrepresented her age to gain access to the Web site.

A federal court of appeals ruling limiting the scope of protection under the Communications Decency Act will not drastically affect online journalism, but the future could still be uncertain, according to lawyers who wrote an amicus brief on behalf of the media.